About

Radworks is a community-governed network that builds and funds a sovereign developer stack for open-source software. Activities center on technologies for secure code hosting, collaboration, and funding. Current projects include Radicle, a peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git, and Drips, a system for funding open-source ecosystems.

History

Radicle was founded in 2018 by Alexis Sellier and Eleftherios Diakomichalis to develop a sustainable and equitable way to finance and maintain public software projects. Though most software used today relies on publicly available code, free software projects often lack incentivization that enables developers to participate meaningfully. Additionally, open-source projects hosted on Github or Gitlab rely on centralized servers, which goes against the very nature of open-source and decentralized development.

The initial implementation of Radicle was built on the decentralized storage network IPFS, but several technical complications limited its speed and functionality. In 2019, the core team decided to shift direction and replace IPFS with Git as the storage and replication layer of the network. Git then paired with a peer-to-peer networking layer for discovering peers became the basis for Radicle Link, the protocol currently underlying the Radicle network.

Radicle has been designed to enable a code collaboration environment similar to centralized platforms. The difference is that Radicle operates on a peer-to-peer network to eliminate the reliance on trusted intermediaries. All network data is stored locally and disseminated by participants, allowing developers to collaborate on Git repositories without requiring a centralized server. Released in November 2020, Radicle Upstream is a desktop client developed by the project team and is the gateway to using the network.

Radicle doesn't feature a consensus layer; however, the team experimented with a new ledger development, known as the Radicle Registry (previously oscoin), between 2018-2020. In 2021, Radicle deployed its Ethereum integration, an opt-in solution in place of the Radicle Registry that allows participants to anchor canonical project metadata to Ethereum. The integration is a set of smart contracts that also features the network’s ERC-20 governance token, Radicle (RAD). The Ethereum integration ensures project state immutability, facilitates code collaboration for decentralized organizations, and introduces an economic model for the collective governance and ownership of the protocol. Network participants are subject to fees when interacting with the Ethereum smart contracts. All fees generated by the protocol flow to the community-run Radicle Treasury.

The Radicle DAO manages the protocol's Ethereum integration and on-chain treasury. The first Radicle DAO decision took place in February 2021, unlocking the use of a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) to distribute 3.75% of RAD supply to the community. Only 50% of the tokens allocated to the LBP were distributed during the 2-day event, which ran from Feb. 25-27, 2021. On March 1, 2021, the LBP was unpaused to satisfy the demand for token liquidity. On March 18, 2021, a subsequent governance proposal removed the remaining RAD from the LBP and added them to a Uniswap trading pair.